JUST IN: A new drawing by David Hockney of the recently desecrated totem stump he made famous in his East Yorkshire landscape paintings such as “Winter Timber,” 2009, which is currently on view at the Museum Ludwig in Hockney’s traveling exhibition “A Bigger Picture.”

“It was just an unbelievably mean-spirited gesture,” says Hockney as he creates a new sketch shown here.

The 75-year-old artist is convinced the stump was targeted because it had become possibly the most famous piece of dead wood in Britain after he portrayed it in several of his acclaimed landscapes of the countryside around his home in Bridlington. “It is something that has made me depressed. It was just a spite. There are loads of very mean things here now in Britain.”

Hockney was told about the vandalism after he returned home from Cologne, now hosting his record-breaking exhibition A Bigger Picture, which includes 300 of his landscapes and some of his latest works created on a wooden-framed iPad. He immediately visited the butchered remains of the stump, which is on the edge of Woldgate, a quiet, mud-splattered country lane a few miles outside Bridlington.

“It was something that I rather enjoyed,” he says of the old tree. “It had been cut down a while back because it was dead but I liked the way it was and I said to the landowners: ‘Leave it that way’ and they did, and then somebody else comes along with a big saw. It must have taken two hours to do.”

Hockney does not mind the old tree being sprayed with paint because the stump was always battered by the wind and the rain but says its destruction really upset him. Does it change the nature of his original painting? “It does in a way, a little bit,” he says.

Patrick Barkham, The Guardian UK, read complete article here